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It's been a busy and lazy summer, so I've had little surplus time and energy to keep up with my Forbes blogging, so I've been sort of taking a sabbatical. But I figured I couldn't let Kurt Eichenwald's recent Vanity Fair story on Microsoft's decline pass by without a reaction.

The article has been highly anticipated for some time. Like everybody else in technology, I was eagerly waiting to read it.

But I was sorely disappointed. The article, despite the research and extensive interviewing that clearly went into it, entirely misses the forest for the trees. It is deeply superficial. It confuses effect for cause, spins the entire tale around caricatured larger-than-life personalities, and uncritically takes insider accounts of the politicized culture at face value. It only just stops short of being pure TMZ-style celebrity sensationalism. Unfortunately he is never able to rise above his attraction to the human drama, and the temptation to inflate its importance and make it the main plot (he would do well on Aaron Sorkin's staff). His biggest failing is in what he leaves out: discussion of broader industry structure trends, which in my opinion are the real, if duller, story.

So ultimately, this amounts to little more than an eloquent hatchet job on Ballmer. The sort of thing that adds momentum to a lynching discourse but is ultimately an unimportant subplot. Ballmer is a minor part of the problem, and if replacing him becomes necessary, it will be a minor part of the solution.

So why is this dramatic human story ultimately a distraction (and even a danger), and what is the real story here? Because I do agree with Eichenwald on one thing: Microsoft is in trouble and has been for a while.

This focus on human drama is a common pathology that rears its head when mainstream media (though I suppose, with my Forbes hat on, I am nominally part of it) tackles technology. Industry structure trends and analysis are boring. People-centric stories, especially "glorious leader" heroic narratives, are so much more fun to read and write.

But ultimately, they suggest a dangerous sort of path-dependent "it could have been different if only such and such key person had been different" narrative that gets its emotional power from more hopeful, but ultimately specious counterfactuals. Technological evolution is more robust than that.

Single individuals, sadly for those fond of human dramas, are never that important. Even really big personalities like Ballmer, Gates and Jobs are products rather than makers of history.

So what is the real reason for Microsoft's woes? The answer lies in that boring old MBA subject of industry structure dynamics. There is less entertaining human drama in that story, but you get both a more robust narrative that is not so sensitive to the speculative impact of individual personalities, and (to the technologist) more interesting conclusions.

Eichenwald's version of the story is a sort of "personality determinism." All flavors of determinism are partial truths at best, but personality determinism is particularly weak and small-minded (and peculiarly American). Environmental determinism, which I favor, has its flaws, but is not quite as brittle (and you do need to pick some sort of ism poison to tell a coherent story).